The Book of Lamentations - Hardcover

Castellanos, Rosario; Allen, Esther

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1568860382 ISBN 13: 9781568860381

Publisher: Marsilio Pub, 1996

Synopsis

In the Mexican state of Chiapas in the 1930s, poverty, illiteracy, and rage contribute to an uprising among the descendants of the Mayan Indians

About this title

Review

Thirty years before the Zapatista uprising in Chiapas brought this little-known corner of Mexico to the world's notice, Mexican author Rosario Castellanos created a similar rebellion in her 1962 novel The Book of Lamentations. Castellanos has framed her story, which is set in the 1930s, around an actual 1860s uprising of Maya Indians against the Chiapan white ruling class. History and fiction meld seamlessly, mainly because conditions in the Chiapas Castellanos knew as a child hadn't changed much in the intervening 70 years; as late as the 1920s, impoverished Indians still served as mules, carrying white landowners strapped to their backs.

The book's title is apt; Castellanos casts an unflinching eye on the effects of oppression, ignorance, and misery. The central characters, motivated variously by desperation, superstition, or ambition, may not be admirable, but they are all too human. In the end, a rebellion culminating in the grisly crucifixion of a child is doomed to failure. Although The Book of Lamentations is not a pleasant book, in an age where history seems increasingly to be repeating itself in Asia, in the Balkans, in Mexico, and elsewhere, it is a deeply instructive one.

About the Author

Rosario Castellanos (1925-74) was born Mexico City and spent much of her childhood in Comitán, in Mayan southern Mexico. After traveling to Europe and to the United States for advanced study in aesthetics, she returned to the province of Chiapas to work with Indian theater groups and the Indigenous Institute of San Cristóbal. Much of her work, even throughout her involvement with the literary group "The Generation of the '50s," tried to traverse the distance between the pre-Columbian and the European cultural traditions of Mexico. While serving as Mexican ambassador to Israel, Castellanos died in a freak household accident in Tel Aviv. In an irony she might have enjoyed, she was buried in the rotunda of Illustrious Men, in Mexico City.

About this edition

• Publisher: Marsilio Pub
• Publication date: 1996
• ISBN 10: 1568860382
• ISBN 13: 9781568860381
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 400